Amazon credits analog with making Ocelot a more-efficient quantum chip

Amazon AWS Amazon Web Services is the third of the Big Three cloud computing giants to announce a quantum computing chip breakthrough this week, joining Microsoft last week and Google in December. Amazon's researchers claim their chip, Ocelot, can be much more efficient in using qubits, the fundamental building block of quantum computing, in an approach akin to traditional chip transistors. In a technical research article in this week's Nature magazine, lead author Harald Putterman of Amazon's AWS Center for Quantum Computing in Pasadena, Calif., and colleagues explain how the use of analog circuits, rather than digital ones and zeros, can drastically reduce the number of physical qubits needed for a working quantum chip. Also: Microsoft's quantum chip Majorana 1 is a few qubits short A blog post from Amazon explains more details about the effort in simpler language than the Nature paper. The chip follows on the announcement last week by Microsoft of its Majorana 1 chip, and Goog ... Read full article.